You have no idea just how peachy it has been to create a piece of art with my new vision after spending so many months re-blogging earlier pieces and promoting those which have sold. My heart and soul are leaping with joy. Just as well in view of the unconscionable state prevailing in the UK after a general election. I am reminded of my favourite quote from erstwhile US President Jimmy Carter (and there are many to choose from) which says it all when one thinks of Prime Minister Theresa May’s parentage: the daughter of a vicar no less. “If you don’t want your tax dollars to help the poor, then stop saying you want a country based on Christian values because you don’t.’

The original is a photochrom from the Library of Congress of the entrance to the harbour at St. Malo in France taken between 1890 and 1900. I duplicated the image, ran the jpg through the Topaz Impressions Abstraction II filter, which I added as a third layer before topping with one of my yellow textures. I made use of a variety of Photoshop blends such as Darken, Lighter Colour and Screen.

The Turner Contemporary gallery in Margate writes that ‘Turner’s connection with Margate was the founding inspiration for our organisation. He loved Margate for the sea, the skies, and his landlady Mrs Booth.’ Don’t you just love it that he was potty about his landlady!

In the 1700s, bathing in the sea and drinking seawater became a fashionable cure for all sorts of diseases. From the Georgian period onwards visitors from London began flocking to resorts like Margate for the seawater cure and increasingly as a place to socialise. Margate has built a reputation as a place for bathing in the sea – both for health and pleasure.

Margate has a special place in the history of the ‘Bathing Machine’ with Benjamin Beale inventing the modest hood in 1753. This canvas canopy could be lowered and raised by the driver of the machine, allowing bathers a modicum of privacy as well as some protection from wind and waves.

A man opening the door of a woman’s bathing machine. [Wikimedia]

Whilst in Margate recuperating from a nervous breakdown, TS Eliot sat at the Grade II listed shelter on Margate seafront and composed the key lines in his poem ’The Waste Land’ – “On Margate Sands./I can connect/Nothing with nothing./The broken fingernails of dirty hands./My people humble people who expect/Nothing”.

Margate, was the first place to offer and popularise donkey rides on the beach, starting back in the early 1800s.

And for my next trick, I have used the same Venetian Harbour in Chania photograph (Overlay mode in Photoshop) to show baking hot, sand-encrusted houses overlooking the sea.The underlay (Normal mode) is a texture from 2 Lil’ Owls (2LO Distressed 21).

And oh boy, does that red desert dust cover everything. The Libyan Desert may be closer to South Crete but those pesky winds sweep it up and over. Every morning our beaten-up car is caked in the stuff.

That’s not even taking the henna-red earth of our garden into consideration. In the early days, I considered how it could be pressed into service. Might we be able to sieve it and press it into jars with some magic ingredient that would serve as hair dye? Would it work as a tanning agent? Was I ever seriously going to do any such thing? A resounding no! But it was fun to think about.

Which reminds me of our Greek friend ‘Panioyotis’. He was born in mainland Greece but brought up in Germany. He works mainly in the tourist industry but is constantly dreaming up ideas to make money, none of which he ever follows through, though not before he has brought me on board as his website designer and general factotum.

There were the rape alarms that are illegal in Greece but that he planned to order and dispatch from Germany. There were the lighthouses he hoped Mr FND would make out of abandoned wooden palettes.There was the time he saw one of my images—

Eventually, we realised these were pipe dreams that were never going to amount to anything. How much money he wasted on research—ordering the alarms and so forth—we’ll never know.

‘Panioyotis’ is now working back in Germany. He visits occasionally and although it’s lovely to see him, we have one problem: our dog, Pisch, has never liked him and barks constantly when he’s around. This activity is usually a good indicator of the decency of another human being but not in this case for ‘Panioyotis’ is a sweetheart!

A direct contrast to the feel of yesterday’s Song for Freedom, Land, Ho! is another design from a few years ago that centres on my photograph of an abandoned fishing boat in Nea Chora in Chania on the island of Crete, and to which I added textures from Shadowhouse Creations.

To say ‘abandoned’ is, perhaps, to stretch the truth since one sees many apparently abandoned boats (and houses) on this island that have not been abandoned but have been worked on for years without any sign of improvement! When it comes to the dilapidated houses, it can be assumed that the owners are a disparate collection of family members who have inherited the property and who can’t agree on what should be done with it. It is so sad to see them going by the board as they are often three or four hundred years-old and beautiful examples of Venetian or Ottoman Empire architecture.

Land Ho!
If I get my hands on a dollar bill
Gonna buy a bottle and drink my fill.[Lyrics to Land Ho by The Doors]

Sea Fever by John Masefield 1878–1967

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by;
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking,

I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.

For The Fallen

With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,
England mourns for her dead across the sea.
Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit,
Fallen in the cause of the free.

Solemn the drums thrill; Death august and royal
Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres,
There is music in the midst of desolation
And a glory that shines upon our tears.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted;
They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

They mingle not with their laughing comrades again;
They sit no more at familiar tables of home;
They have no lot in our labour of the day-time;
They sleep beyond England’s foam.

But where our desires are and our hopes profound,
Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,
To the innermost heart of their own land they are known
As the stars are known to the Night;

As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain;
As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,
To the end, to the end, they remain.

by Laurence Binyon

Drawing of Laurence Binyon by William Strang, 1901

Binyon wrote For the Fallen between the retreat from Mons and the victory of the Marne (1914):

“I can’t recall the exact date beyond that it was shortly after the retreat. I was set down, out-of-doors, on a cliff in Polzeath, Cornwall. The stanza They Shall Grow Not Old was written first and dictated the rhythmical movement of the whole poem.” All Poetry

When we were staying with friends in Crete a few years ago, we went to the Remembrance Service at the Allied Cemetery, designed by Louis de Soisson, in Souda Bay. It is a beautiful setting on a hill from which you can see the whole of the bay.

Souda Bay Cemetery

Every year, an old ex-pat recites the They Shall Grow Not Old stanza, as he did when we were there. He infuriated us by saying ‘We shall remember them’ instead of ‘We will remember them’. When we mentioned how frustrating this was, we were told that he gets it wrong every year, even though he has been told many times about the error. He refuses to let anyone else do it, apparently. It’s a great shame. My actual words at the time — under my breath — are unprintable.

It would be lovely to say that the photograph I used for At the Going Down of the Sun was of Souda Bay but although it is in Crete, I can’t remember where! I added a delicious texture from 2 Lil’ Owls to create a Turner-like effect.

The perfect binder to keep all your travel plans in one place! This is a digital painting of the mosque in the Venetian Harbour in Chania, Crete. It is one of the oldest surviving buildings from the time of the Ottoman Empire and was built in 1645. Worship took place in the mosque until 1923 when the Muslims left the island in an exchange between Greece and Turkey. Janissaries is the Turkish word for ‘new troops’, men who were recruited, ironically, from the non-Muslim fraternity and worked as household troops and bodyguards of the sultan. Once containing the Chania museum, in recent years the mosque has been hosting small art exhibitions.